BENGALURU: Uber has opened its first engineering centre in Asia in Bengaluru, highlighting the growing importance of India to the US-based ride-hailing app.

"India market is becoming really really important to us, so we had to build a engineering centre here", Uber CTO Thuan Pham said.

"We cannot imagine the local challenges and conditions sitting in our headquarters in San Franscisco. Our team in India will help us work more efficiently for localised problems," he added.

The centre is currently headed by Jaikumar Ganesh who is based out of San Franscisco but Pham said they are scouting for a permanent India engineering head.

Uber currently has 7-8 engineers in India and plans to ramp it up in the future to work on India-specific solutions. Some of these problems include low connectivity, congestion and improving the accuracy of the estimated arrival time.

Pham hopes that these solutions can later be extended to other countries as well. For instance, cash payments were piloted in India before extending to other International cities like Vietnam and Nairobi. Uber currently employs around 1,000 engineers across 9 engineering centres worldwide.

In July, Uber had committed $50 million in setting up a centre in Hyderabad to train its driver and customer support staff. The taxi aggregator had stated plans of hiring about 500 people for this facility over the next 5 years.

In fact, segment leaders like Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and Hero MotoCorp have reported de-growth of 34.3 per cent, 45 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively giving a clear indication of a prolonged slowdown in the sector.